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SQL Storage for the real world

In this session I will introduce the wide variety of options available for SQL storage and how to decide on a strategy. I will give some guidance on gathering your requirements, setting performance criteria for your intended solution and ways to level the playing field for vendors to propose solutions. We will look at identifying your usage patterns and deciding on what aspects of storage are most important to you, be it IO, bandwidth or capacity. We will look at the relationship between IO and bandwidth and how IO size can affect sizing. I will briefly go over why partition alignment is important. We will look at how your options are narrowed based on your HA / DR strategies (including changes coming with AlwaysON), as well as what non-SQL DR strategies are possible when using SAN storage. A brief overview of the difference between running FC and ISCSI SAN’s and the contrast between framed and frameless SAN’s. I will briefly cover when SSD’s and cloud storage should be considered as well as the benefits that are possible with PCI SSD’s, and then wrap up with ways to validate and test the solutions before you buy.

Born in South Africa, I moved into IT soon after school as a natural progression of my hobby. Having worked my way through several different parts of the industry including end user and server support I have now focused exclusively on SQL Server for the last 6 years. Work experience has included the online gaming industry and online marketing. I moved to the UK 3 years ago and I am now solely responsible for all data in our organisation.
I am passionate about server performance and specifically the rapidly changing SQL storage options available to us.